Home › A Calendar of Dinners › Baked Stuffed Heart
Baked Stuffed Heart
Take an ox heart and season it inside with salt and pepper, and fill it quite full of herb forcemeat; fasten it up with a needle and string, rub the heart over well with melted Crisco and fold it up in a well Criscoed paper; tie it up, put heart in a baking tin in the oven, keeping it well basted with melted Crisco, then remove the paper and dish upon a hot dish, and serve round it a good brown sauce or tomato sauce or brown caper sauce, and garnish with olive potatoes. This should be served while hot.
The original gives no oven temperature, no time and no quantity for the stuffing, which is typical of the book. Everything below fills those gaps.
- The hinge: low and slowHeart is dense working muscle, almost entirely lean, and it turns to rubber if cooked fast. Roast covered at 300-325F for 2 1/2 to 3 hours, until a skewer slides in with no resistance. High heat and a short roast will give you something inedible.
- What an ox heart isA whole beef heart, 3-5 lb, from a mature animal. Butchers today will often order in veal or beef heart rather than stocking it in the case; two smaller veal hearts can stand in for one large beef heart. Trim the hard outer fat, the valves and the tubes at the top, and rinse the chambers well.
- CriscoThe book is a Procter & Gamble promotional volume, so every fat is Crisco. Any solid shortening, lard, butter or beef drippings works; butter browns better on the outside once the paper comes off.
- The Criscoed paperThis is a greased-paper wrapper, the ancestor of the foil tent, meant to keep the surface from drying while the interior cooks through. Parchment or foil does the same job. Uncover for the last 20-30 minutes to colour the outside.
- Herb forcemeatA basic bread stuffing: about 2 cups soft breadcrumbs, 1/2 cup chopped suet or butter, a small grated onion, a tablespoon each of chopped parsley and thyme or sage, salt, pepper and an egg to bind. Heart cavities vary; expect to need 1 1/2 to 2 cups.
- FasteningTrussing needle and butcher's twine are the period method and still the best one, since the chambers open as the muscle contracts. Skewers plus twine laced between them work if you have no needle.
- Basting and the sauceThere is very little fat in heart, so the pan gives almost no drippings; baste with additional melted fat as directed. Make the brown, tomato or caper sauce separately rather than expecting to build it from the pan.
- Olive potatoes and yieldThe garnish is potatoes cut to olive shapes with a knife or small scoop, then boiled or browned in fat. One beef heart with stuffing serves 5 or 6, carved crosswise in slices so each portion gets some forcemeat.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble in the 1910s to persuade cooks to abandon lard and butter for Crisco, which is why a shortening is specified for greasing, basting and even the paper wrapper. The dish itself is older and has nothing to do with vegetable fat: stuffed heart was a standard economy roast in British and American kitchens, appearing in cookbooks throughout the nineteenth century as a way of turning a very cheap, very lean piece of offal into something that carved and served like a joint. The greased-paper jacket and the choice of a strong accompanying sauce, brown, tomato or caper, are both concessions to the same problem, that heart is dry and firm and needs help on either side.